README

Super Expressive PHP

Super Expressive PHP is a PHP library that allows you to build regular expressions in almost natural language - with no extra dependencies, and a lightweight code footprint.

This library is a port of https://github.com/francisrstokes/super-expressive

Why?

Regex is a very powerful tool, but its terse and cryptic vocabulary can make constructing and communicating them with others a challenge. Even developers who understand them well can have trouble reading their own back just a few months later! In addition, they can't be easily created and manipulated in a programmatic way - closing off an entire avenue of dynamic text processing.

That's where Super Expressive PHP comes in. It provides a programmatic and human readable way to create regular expressions. It's API uses the fluent builder pattern, and is completely immutable. It's built to be discoverable and predictable:

• properties and methods describe what they do in plain English
• order matters! quantifiers are specified before the thing they change, just like in English (e.g. SuperExpressive::create()->exactly(5)->digit())
• if you make a mistake, you'll know how to fix it. SuperExpressive will guide you towards a fix if your expression is invalid
• subexpressions can be used to create meaningful, reusable components

SuperExpressive turns those complex and unwieldy regexes that appear in code reviews into something that can be read, understood, and properly reviewed by your peers - and maintained by anyone!

For the complete API documentation, visit https://github.com/francisrstokes/super-expressive

Example

The following example recognises and captures the value of a 16-bit hexadecimal number like 0xC0D3.

$myRegex = SuperExpressive::create()
  ->startOfInput()
  ->optional()->string('0x')
  ->capture()
    ->exactly(4)->anyOf()
      ->range('A', 'F')
      ->range('a', 'f')
      ->range('0', '9')
    ->end()
  ->end()
  ->endOfInput()
  ->toRegexString();

// Produces the following regular expression:
/^(?:0x)?([A-Fa-f0-9]{4})$/

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require bassim/super-expressive-php